When statistical software reads a "raw" character format data file consisting of ASCII or EBCDIC characters, it must read each byte in sequence.

The current version recognizes approximately 280 character sets, including 19 EBCDIC variants with national character support.

Unfortunately, there is no EBCDIC encoder by default, so we'll convert the value to a UTF-16LE byte array (which just adds in a "0" byte for the second byte of each character).